In December of 2019, several media reported that Rusmolco had given its dairy cows virtual reality headsets in a bid to reduce their anxiety and improve productivity. It was reported that the herd donned VR systems adapted for the structural features of cow heads and were shown a unique summer field simulation program to improve the herd's emotional mood. Those reports appeared to be a fake. Rusmolco has nothing to do with the news about using VR for controlling cows' mood, Firsova said.
The weird thing is that when I first saw this image a few days ago my immediate reaction was it was fake. But when I googled it I only saw articles about it being real, including a BBC article, which left me thinking it was real.
A lot of ranchers don't care about the cows and beat them, hurt them, neglect them... If they wanna make more money they'd be more cruel. VR monitors with a simulation of green pastures? What a joke!
How do the cows walk, if they are blinded? How much do they cost, that would make their investment pay off? Don't they get broken easily? Who developped the tech?
I could see it being a grad student project. It would be very difficult to do though.
You'd need a custom headset and software. Which is challenging but individuals have certainly done that before.
Feedback fron the cow wise you'd have to restain them and get base vitals and then train them to be ok wearing the headset. Once you had them used to it you could compare vital readings while restained without the headset and then with it.
It'd probably be a complete failure but a lot of experiments are.
Cow, like any prey animal swivels it’s eyes to check the sides and behind: “I am lost in a sea of blackness, trapped without recourse. I have no means to end this misery”
funfact when a cow bends it's head down to eat grass it can see an almost complete 360° around itself. So VR headsets would be some sort of confusing existential torture.
It was reported that the herd donned VR systems adapted for the structural features of cow heads and were shown a unique summer field simulation program to improve the herd's emotional mood. Those reports appeared to be a fake. Rusmolco has nothing to do with the news about using VR for controlling cows' mood, Firsova said.
Thank you. I believed it at first and then thought about the costs and the logistics of keeping a Vr headset on a cow, plus the damage of the cow’s eyes, and thought “no fucking way this is real”
Even if you made a headset that worked for a cow... wouldn't it have to be some sort of combination of VR/AR in the first place just so the cow could move correctly in 3D space without freaking the fuck out?
Good luck explaining traditional VR movement strategies and disconnection from your physical bearings to... a cow.
Probably a grad student research project for their dissertation. I doubt they are trying to scale it but for publishing the impact a decent set of these with cows on randomized trials should not be too high cost.
In Russia, it’s probably cheaper to make VR headsets and the availability of year round sunny pastures of negligible. Even summer weather kind of sucks in most of Russia IMO
It's bullshit, there is nothing hooked up to the headset, even if we assume it runs on batteries it is still impractical as hell. Googling yields nothing more than this image and a commercial plus a super sketchy video. Nothing on what the cow actually sees, how the hardware works or what it is.
You would think that if this was real, then between 2019 when it first came out and now there would be more than the original two images and endless "news" articles quouting eachother in a circlejerk to support this being true.
You can find a few more, with a different headset which is even more obviously fake as they didnt care enough to hide the sides. I believe the one pictured here is one of those shitty mobile phone vr glasses. So its large to support a giant flagship phone
the press release says the experiment wasn’t conducted by a university but by “Milknews.ru,” a news site for the Russian dairy industry. It also encourages readers to sign up for the upcoming “VI International Agro-Industrial Dairy Forum” where they can learn more about technology in agriculture. This suggests the VR cows might just be a good way to get attention for an otherwise run-of-the-mill conference. If so: job done.
Exactly. The amount of milk a cow produce extra due to the VR headset is probably negligible amounts. So equipping 10 000 cows with VRHS for example an extra litre per day is not a balanced trade. But an extra litre per cow per day means 365 litres in a year. The amount of cows multiply this number. So if you have an enormous facility harboring 10 000 cows that's 3 650 000 annually, and in time you'll have earned back the investments. Those money bought themselves back and upped your income by over 5 million annually. And you didn't have to buy another 1000 cows to do it. You didn't have to build out your already capped-on-space facility. You didn't have to hire more workers. It's a brilliantly refined process!
Well, its fake now, but I can see it being useful. If green fields increase milk production, then there would be 2 options. 1) get more land that is an open field, 2) use the headsets. Land could end up being more expensive than land st some point
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u/Comedyclan 26d ago
How tf does this make economic sense? Talk about milking every penny.